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Mozilla Monitor is shady

Onerep is a privacy monitoring service/ privacy provider that Mozilla partnered with for their Mozilla Monitor service.

Yesterday, Brian Krebs (a cybersecurity journalist) dug into Onerep and found that the CEO is a shady Belarussian. Dimitri Shelest, CEO, of Onerep owns multiple “people searching” websites. Shelest has also been linked to aggressive spam and affiliate marketing emails.

Onerep’s reputation is shady due to their CEO’s multiple conflicts of interest. At worst, Onerep is sucking your personal information. At best, you’re paying for a service that doesn’t do anything. Either way, I would not trust Mozilla Monitor service .

This is a copy and paste from a post I made to firefox@lemmy.ml. I do not no know how to crosspost and I apologise for my mistake a head of time.

pineapplelover ,

If you're looking for a data removal service, I can personally vouch for easyoptouts. I made a post here about it.

https://lemm.ee/post/22988838

lemmyreader ,

The krebsonsecurity.com page had an update where Mozilla is quoted :

Update, March 15, 11:35 a.m. ET: Many readers have pointed out something that was somehow overlooked amid all this
research: The Mozilla Foundation, the company that runs the Firefox Web browser, has launched a data removal service
called Mozilla Monitor service that bundles OneRep. That notice says Mozilla Monitor is offered as a free or paid
subscription service.

“The free data breach notification service is a partnership with Have I Been Pwned (“HIBP”),” the Mozilla Foundation
explains. “The automated data deletion service is a partnership with OneRep to remove personal information published on
publicly available online directories and other aggregators of information about individuals (“Data Broker Sites”).”

In a statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity.com, Mozilla said they did assess OneRep’s data removal service to confirm
it acts according to privacy principles advocated at Mozilla.

“We were aware of the past affiliations with the entities named in the article and were assured they had ended prior to our
work together,” the statement reads. “We’re now looking into this further. We will always put the privacy and security of our
customers first and will provide updates as needed.”

TheAnonymouseJoker ,

Privacy concerns aside, may I ask what does it have to do with the "Belarussian" nationality of CEO of Onerep? Xenophobia is not allowed. Edit that out.

jjlinux , (edited )

While I agree that the comment by the OP may be construed as Xenophobic, can we agree that it could also just be a part of the information with no ill intent? Based on that, would it be too hard to ask the OP to please edit it out instead of just delivering that as an order?
I didn't think about the potential of seeing that comment as xenophobic until you mentioned it, and realize more people could find it distasteful, but there's no need to deliver the message in the form of a command.

TheAnonymouseJoker ,

While I agree that the comment by the OP may be construed as Xenophobic, can we agree that it could also just be a part of the information with no ill intent?

No, there is no possible agreement. If this was an American company or CEO, the nationality would most likely be welcomed in a sorry manner.

The order I stated was as a moderator. We at Lemmy do not welcome xenophobia and similar elements. OP has not even bothered to reply or comply in almost half a day.

jjlinux , (edited )

I'm not going to downvote your comment, because I strongly believe that we're all entitled to our own opinion.

Now, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, xenophobia is defined as "fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign".
Nowhere does the OP display fear or hatred of any type of group, race, religion, nationality or anything else. The thread is about a CEO that is known for having a horrible track record with the privacy of the data his companies collect.

Mentioning a nationality alone is not xenophobia.

Additionally, whether you are a moderator or just a regular user, it does not justify talking to anyone in the way you do.

It is highly likely that the OP has not complied or replied precisely because of the way you chose to word your comment. If it was me, I would have probably removed the nationality from the post, and would not have replied to you, but we're all different.

A moderator moderates. To moderate is to lessen the intensity or extremeness of.

While I respect the tasks moderators do, because they take the time to maintain toxicity away as much as humanly possible, which is not an easy task, being a moderator does not give anyone the right to treat others with disrespect, regardless of the situation.

Now, I have no idea of the extent of a moderator's power in Lemmy instances, but if you kick me out, ban me, or whatever, know that I dont really mind. My reason for being here is wanting to interact with others on productive and respectful conversations, but by no means would that affect me in any significant way. I'm not challenging you, but this is one of the reasons I removed Reddit from my life. Too many moderators with low to no tolerance towards anything they thought was against their rules and acting like dictators.

beefbot ,

Sorry to pile on but since we’re already splitting hairs: it’s the phrasing that pushes it over into xenophobia. A better way might be for example “the CEO is shady. A Belorussian, [name] is…”. But combined in the same noun phrase - “a shady X” - puts it past whatever fine line we’re debating

jjlinux ,

Oh, I fully agree that the OP could have certainly phrase that better. As I mentioned in my first comment, the way it was phrased can give way to understanding it as a xenophobic comment. My issue is not with the interpretation of the OPs post, but with the way this mod chose to address it. He apparently expects EVERYONE else to be careful how they word their ideas, but that rules applies to everyone but himself.
The moment he mentioned "xenophobic", I realized that this was easily interpreted as such, and the way you suggest it could have been phrased does allow to disregard that possibility. Another way the OP could have said it is: "Dimitri Shelest, a Belorussian with a shady record" or any other way to avoid a potential misinterpretation of his/her comment, and like the moderator, I also believe that everyone would be better served if the OP just modifies it.
I still think that, when voicing thoughts and opinions, more than the content itself, it's all in the delivery.

TheAnonymouseJoker ,

While I respect the tasks moderators do, because they take the time to maintain toxicity away as much as humanly possible, which is not an easy task, being a moderator does not give anyone the right to treat others with disrespect, regardless of the situation.

OP is disrespecting Belarussians as a whole. I am not.

jjlinux ,

Wao, OK bro. I can appreciate when a conversation is not going to move forward. Have a nice weekend.

cygnus ,
@cygnus@lemmy.ca avatar

Belarus is a puppet state of Russia, which I would place alongside China as the country I would least trust with any of my data.

utopiah ,

At least they are very clear about what data is at risk here, namely "OneRep receives your

  • first and last name,
  • email address,
  • phone number,
  • physical address and
  • date of birth

in order to scan data broker sites to find your personal data and request its removal." cf https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/subscription-services/

It's indeed not a good look anyway to be partnering (without doing much that sharing your brand, and thus trust invested in you) with somebody apparently solving the problem... they themselves help fuel.

FeelzGoodMan420 ,

Is this a shitpost? I'm confused as to how they'd verify if your accounts are compromised without knowing your basic info.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

That's not the problem, the problem is whether we can actually trust Mozilla Monitor to not sell the same data you're trying to scrub.

FeelzGoodMan420 ,

Fair enough. I completely agree that the feature creep is concerning and aggravating. I think it comes down to them trying to grow adoption of the browser and services. Mozilla has like a 1% market share. I'll still use it over chrome or edge. At least we can disable all the bullshit in about:config or just not sign up for the extra services.

Scolding0513 ,

This reminds me of that one virus where you put your Credit Card info into the shady website to check that "your card is not in any hacker database" lmao

LWD ,

At best, OneRep is sucking your data through Mozilla.

This isn't even the worst thing Mozilla has done recently: they also

  • Bought an "AI" shopping company with a trove of private data
  • Promise they will sell the data to advertisers
  • Integrated this into Firefox:

FakeSpot collects your browsing and search history

More info

JCreazy ,

Fakespot is so inaccurate that I stopped using it.

Daughter3546 OP ,

I really love Firefox, but I dislike some of the initiatives the for-profit arm, Mozilla Corporation, is taking. This is another head scratcher moments for me. I want my browser to be just a browser. I don't want Pocket, Google Search, nor any other nonsense.

I get that they are subsiding the development costs of Firefox, but surely, there must be other avenues to generate revenue. It is really hypocritical of Mozilla when they market Firefox as a privacy focused alternative to Chrome/Edge/Safari and then bundle ads and sponsored nonsense.

LWD ,

That's the thing, Mozilla keeps talking about diversifying to avoid becoming irrelevant, but those diversification efforts seem to only involve finding a shiny new thing, chasing it, then dropping it and laying off 60 employees. And then pursuing the next shiny new thing

Daughter3546 OP ,

You couldn't have said it better. If money and revenue is an issue, then why keep chasing the next shiny thing.

Just last month, they had a press release announcing they'll incorporate AI into their product suite. In my opinion, the release was just a buzzword laden nonsense. I just don't see the why other than to keep themselves relevant.

LWD ,

I did some digging into FakeSpot's history. I don't have the pages handy, but they didn't call themselves an AI company until 2022. I doubt anything changed. And at one point, they were even dabbling with NFT verification (something they've since purged from their site).

Mozilla is chasing trends by... Buying other companies that are also chasing trends.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Agreed. They have so many options for privacy-respecting value adds, but they often fall short. For example, their VPN:

They picked a good vendor, but they missed so many opportunities to really make it a standout feature.

And there's more they could do like that:

  • private, local only ads with revenue share with sites
  • create a Mozilla payment network using GNU Taler or similar; you'd pay Mozilla to get credits (potentially with crypto if you don't trust Mozilla with payment info), and sites would opt in to accept those credits, and the user remains anonymous
  • integrate with popular password management service like Bitwarden - have it work seamlessly with their other offerings

There's plenty more ideas like that as well. However, I don't trust Mozilla to actually follow through with any of them since they've dropped the ball every other time.

LWD ,

I really, really like the idea of paying content creators some amount of a monthly budget based on site views.

My only critique of your really thoughtful comment is: I really want those features to be modular. Every time Mozilla drops an extension like Pocket and integrates it directly into the browser, it seems to upset two groups of people:

  • People who don't want the extension, who are now forced to tolerate or remove it
  • People who do want the extension, who tend to be disappointed with the way the integration is accomplished.

I can guarantee after watching Brave do their crap that people generally don't want a browser installing an ad network or a VPN without their consent, especially when the browser is already considered pretty big like Firefox. Chrome might suck, but it's practically a minimalist browser compared to Firefox... If not in function, then at least in presentation.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

I really want those features to be modular

Oh absolutely, and that's a huge part of why I don't really trust Mozilla to handle it properly.

Brave

That's because Brave didn't deliver on its promise. It said it would pay content creators, but it didn't. It should absolutely be opt-in for both parties (user and site).

So until there's an ethical way to handle advertising, I'll keep my ad-blocker.

LWD ,

There's an interesting conversation to be had about that. Personally, due to its for-profit beginnings, I don't think Brave would have done a good job even if they had followed through on their promises. For example, cryptocurrency has its own issues, and there are ethical problems with replacing a website owner's chosen source of income with reliance on a different, proprietary one.

Mozilla would have to advance much further with Firefox and everything else before any of that is worthy of discussion, unfortunately.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

cryptocurrency has its own issues

I disagree, but it's irrelevant to this discussion. The goal is micro-payments to content creators in-lieu of advertisements and/or profit sharing for advertisements. That could use cryptocurrency, or it could use traditional bank transactions.

And yeah, I agree that there are ethical issues here, which is why Mozilla shouldn't put their own ads on a page w/o the content creator opting in. That's where Brave went wrong, and where I hope Mozilla could get it right.

I think they just need a few big names to agree to it. Mozilla should implement some kind of credit system (i.e. to fund Mozilla VPN and other paid offerings), and make a way to keep track of page views in an anonymous manner and pilot it with some big-name brands (e.g. New York Times or similar). Initially, it would just be micropayments per page view in exchange for no ads, but Mozilla could add their own ads using your local search history (never shared with Mozilla or the website) in-lieu of ads supplied by the vendor.

There is an ethical way to do it, but Brave isn't it and I don't trust Mozilla to do it properly.

suppenloeffel ,
@suppenloeffel@feddit.de avatar

Yikes. This has the potential to seriously damage the reputation of Mozilla. I guess there are 3 possibilities:

  • Onerep isn't actually shady, but partnering with a company part of a conglomerate with companies directly opposing the stated goal isn't a good look either way
  • Onerep is shady and Mozilla failed to conduct the necessary research before partnering with them
  • Onerep is shady and Mozilla knew

In any case: Personally, I'll never not be grateful towards Mozilla for continuing to support and develop Firefox, which is quite literally the only relevant engine standing against the monopoly of chromium and all the bad that entails. But I trust other companies/initiatives/projects more when it comes to services other than the browser engine.

DangerousInternet ,
@DangerousInternet@lemmy.world avatar

I guess they did not knew about it, but only because they just do not give a shit about privacy, only claim they are privacy oriented.

rdyoung ,

If anyone reading this has an account with discover, they offer a similar service for free. If you don't have a discover account, create one.

Tangent5280 ,

It's like a twisted mustache twirling disney villanesque version of data leak conspiracies. Only way I can think of for this to be funnier is if it turns out the dude also had a prominent position in some secret police state agency.

Daughter3546 OP ,

It does sound like a conspiracy and I am advocating to wait until Mozilla addresses the concern. In my opinion, it's likely an oversight and failure to do their due diligence.

sanpo ,

That's a pretty damn big "oversight" for a company claiming to have privacy as one of their main selling points...

Tangent5280 ,

Maybe they're so good at erasing online data that when they got to choosing a CEO, they couldn't find any info on this dude being shady online.

Daughter3546 OP ,

I agree and I am going to give them benefit of doubt until they issue a statement or address it.

fl42v , (edited )

Here's the link, if anyone's interested: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/ceo-of-data-privacy-company-onerep-com-founded-dozens-of-people-search-firms/

Daughter3546 OP ,

Apologies! The links must not have copied over from my post on firefox@lemmy.ml! I'll update the post with the correct links.

Edit: I updated the original post with the correct links.

solrize ,

What does this have to do with Mozilla?

Daughter3546 OP ,

Mozilla partnered with Onerep (the company investigated by Brian Krebs) for their privacy monitoring service. The CEO of Onerep is linked to numerous "people lookup" websites.

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